Senior Platform Engineer (Kubernetes)

TL;DR

Senior Platform Engineer (Kubernetes): Distills Kubernetes & cloud networking abstractions for product teams with an accent on identity, routing, segmentation, and exposure. Focus on designing resilient traffic paths, service trust with mTLS, observability standards, and lifecycle management for company-wide impact.

Location: Los Angeles, CA. Must be a U.S. Person (U.S. citizen, permanent resident, or protected individual) per ITAR export control regulations.

Salary: $165,000 - $215,000 + equity

Company

Building the largest and highest-power satellites for LEO to deep space missions, backed by $450M from leading investors.

What you will do

• Design self-service connectivity abstractions for scoped segmentation, governed exposure, adaptive ingress/egress, and traceable traffic.
• Own service identity & trust including mTLS, cert automation, least-privilege east-west, and governed egress.
• Engineer resilient traffic paths with timeouts, retries, circuit breaking, chaos tests, and MTTR reduction.
• Establish observability standards for end-to-end request paths, policies, saturation, and cost visibility.
• Provide docs, diagnostics, performance/cost optimization, threat modeling, and lifecycle stewardship.
• Mentor engineers, partner with DevX teams, own and maintain EKS-adjacent network infrastructure.

Requirements

• BS/MS in Computer Science or equivalent + 8+ years building/operating distributed systems with Kubernetes/EKS ownership.
• Proficiency in Go, TypeScript, Python, or Java + disciplined SCM workflows.
• Deep cloud/Kubernetes networking: VPC/subnets, routing, segmentation, CNI, DNS, policy enforcement.
• Service trust/identity: mTLS, cert automation/rotation, PKI/SPIFFE.
• Traffic resilience/performance: timeouts, retries, circuit breaking, observability/SLOs.
• IaC/delivery: Terraform/CDK, GitOps; operational experience with chaos injection, upgrades, incidents.

Nice to have

• eBPF/Cilium Hubble or Envoy extensions.
• Gateway API, service mesh (Istio/Linkerd), multi-region failover, IPv6.
• Advanced DNS, policy engines (Kyverno/OPA), API inventory/cost attribution.

Culture & Benefits

• Comprehensive benefits: paid time off, medical/dental/vision, life insurance, paid parental leave.
• Equity in the company.
• Fast-paced Series C space startup environment with multiple launches planned through 2026-2027.
• Encourages non-traditional career paths; team focused on groundbreaking satellite platforms.